Ville Parle

© Philippe Calia,, Three Times, 2024, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta

In 2011, I decided to move to Bombay without having ever set a foot in it. While I stayed in Borivali, I started exploring various corners of the island city, including this mysterious place known as “town”. During the local train rides, the cityscape would unfold in front of my eyes, in the manner of a cinematic reel, leading me to wonder if I would ever be able to make sense of this maze. The scale and layering of the built environment made the camera frame feel irrelevant, too narrow, too silent and flat. The first photographs were taken like notes. Accumulating over the years, they started piecing together, almost by themselves, as if trying to tell me something. After all, didn’t the train sign occasionally read Ville Parle, “City Speaks” in French? From this growing collection of scenes and signs began to emerge recurrent motifs or patterns, one would say. 

2016 is when I processed this first batch of images during a residency. The records of the quotidian suddenly appeared as if ‘day residues’ of some dreamwork. The title of the series, Heptanesia, imposed itself, not as much because of its historical meaning but more for its musicality, and the list of psychological states it could rhyme with–insomnia, schizophrenia, paranoïa, euphoria, amnesia… had I seen this list painted somewhere near Dawai Bazaar ? My intent was to unravel this intuition of a city that sprung out of the waters, a city that somehow did not exist. I was keen to fully dig into its fictional and surreal qualities. It is only much later that I would discover one of its other numerous nicknames - Maya Nagari. City of illusions indeed. Of mirages and mirrors. 

During the local train rides, the cityscape would unfold in front of my eyes, in the manner of a cinematic reel, leading me to wonder if I would ever be able to make sense of this maze.

“I had forgotten that I love Bombay for the way it cuts its fruit”, a friend of mine would write, years later, after coming back from a long stay abroad. 

The more I was coming back to “town”, the more the streets kept poking at my Parisian / flaneur inner self. Old stone arcades and cafés, shop windows with mannequins looking back at you, antique clocks or world maps from another time… There were subtle resonances between the two cities, yet my gaze would inevitably be drawn towards the markets and their local idiosyncrasies, starting with the way street sellers would arrange their vegetables and fruits. “I had forgotten that I love Bombay for the way it cuts its fruit”, a friend of mine would write, years later, after coming back from a long stay abroad. 

© Philippe Calia, Decisive Arrangement (with Mahekand Kalim),2024Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta

This is, eventually, how we forge our relationships to cities, projecting our own contingent biographies onto certain places, signs or people.

Over time, these landmarks start adding up to form a map of our own existences, and this is the moment when we may start calling any of these urban behemoths home. 

© Philippe Calia, Pas de Deux (Jayanthi’s Translation), 2024, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryta

The first time I asked Gautam to paint a board for me was in November 2022. Few hours after giving him the brief, I had to suddenly leave Bombay and make a quick visit to France to see my father. This would be the last time I would see him conscious. Unaware of this fate, excitedly making my way back to Bombay, I wished the plane would have landed straight back onto Princess Street: the painted signboard was ready, waiting for me on the pavement right next to Gautam’s public atelier. Since that episode, this corner of the city inevitably takes me back to this impromptu trip, and the pas de deux between apparition and passing which it had set in motion. This is, eventually, how we forge our relationships to cities, projecting our own contingent biographies onto certain places, signs or people. Over time, these landmarks start adding up to form a map of our own existences, and this is the moment when we may start calling any of these urban behemoths home.

The idealist - some would say the nostalgic - can thus easily proclaim that “translation” is Bombay’s official language.

The signboard declared : “SURRIEL TOURS”. I asked Gautam to change it to SURREAL but not without some hesitation. Should I really consider his spelling as mis-spelling rather than some form of involuntary appropriation, and even, poetry? In cities like Bombay, the everyday is experienced through multiple languages, in the form of jumps, cuts, assemblage, collage, bricolage, sometimes within the same word… The idealist - some would say the nostalgic - can thus easily proclaim that “translation” is Bombay’s official language.

TRANSLATION is precisely what was written in big white-on-red capital letters on the shopfront of a typing center which, unlike most of these tiny offices open on the street, did not have any curtain to protect its owner from the harsh sunlight or nosey passersby like me. I kept crossing it for months while walking on NM Road in Fort and somewhat had the intuition that this could become my “zero point”, the point from where all distances are measured. But it was only during an umpteenth stroll on this street, right when crossing this sign for an umpteenth time, that I finally understood what had to be done. I swiftly took out my mobile phone, looked for a poem by Arun Kolatkar, and asked the shop to get it translated, first in Hindi. The title of the poem? The Pattern. 

The next day is when I received a copy of the translation, signed and stamped. The document then made its way to another typing center, to be translated into another language. Marathi, Gujarati, back to English, Arabic, Urdu, English again, Hindi again, Tamil, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Telugu and so on. The thrust of my drifting (dérive, as the French Situationists had coined this art of the unplanned journey) had finally been uncovered: it would reside in this art object travelling around the city and its evolving re-utterance, like an experiment of collective automatic writing. “Matter kya hai?” the translators would ask, as they usually deal with court judgements and other legal documents, in a language where ambivalence and metaphors are inherently banished. “Ek choti kavita” I would answer, trying to sense in my interlocutor’s eye their share of disbelief and amusement.  

Kolatkar’s original poem mentioned a “twenty foot long turtle”. The animal mysteriously disappeared during one of the translations into Kannada. The mention of turtle was still there in the text however the day I brought it to Mr. Ashok Pednekar, a fine gentleman who was keen after hearing about my origins to reveal his French language skills with an unexpected “Je t’aime”. Like many a translator, Mr. Pednekar would begin his duty by gently reading out the poem that I had brought to him. There was something solemn about such moments, as if Bombay’s translators were suddenly whispering into the ear of the city. Exiting his office, I resumed my stroll in the streets to look for the next typing centre while pursuing my ‘inventory of the real’ in between. Where could the turtle have vanished? I like to imagine it slowly pushing its way into one of Mister Pednekar’s dreams. 

This essay by Philippe Calia was written to accompany The Second Law, his solo exhibition at TARQ, Mumbai (27 February – 29 March 2025). The body of work spans photography, video, and text, offering his personal readings of Bombay/Mumbai — drawn from years of observing the city’s visual grammar, seemingly aimless strolls through its streets, conversations with those encountered along the way, and engagements with the many forms of literature produced about it.

Rather than seeking a particular photographic style, Philippe works with images of various kinds — between found and constructed, figuration and abstraction, moving and still. The form and presentation of these images in space is always crucial, allowing him to explore the situational dimensions of authorship and viewership.

Philippe lives and works in Bangalore. Follow his work @philippecalia.